


Forty-one, three

by quigonejinn



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 16:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5592781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>But there.  A point.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forty-one, three

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for The Force Awakens, and relies on comics history for Poe Dameron.

For forty-one weeks and three days, you carry your child underneath your heart. 

You wake in the morning with him. You lie down at night with him inside, then turn over in the early hours when he puts his heels against your stomach. All in all, you have a healthy pregnancy, standard for your species in almost every way: your hormonal nausea passes shortly after the end of your first trimester; your joints loosen on schedule. Your body thickens and changes. 

Two issues distinguish this pregnancy, though, from others: first, you are Leia Organa, former leader of the Resistance, now a stateswoman, a general of the New Republic, a power in the new universe shaping itself out of the wreckage of the Empire.

Second, you are Force-sensitive at a remarkable, rarefied level. The Force and the midichlorians choose who they will, but your brother is Luke Skywalker. Your mother was Padme Amidala, privately known as Padme Naberrie. Your father was Anakin Skywalker. If your father had not destroyed the Jedi Temple in his path to becoming Darth Vader, there would have been medics to help you navigate the peculiarities of being a Force-sensitive woman pregnant with a Force-sensitive child –- when Luke was on Dagobah with Yoda, they did not, for _some_ reason, cover these niceties. 

To his credit, Luke helps you adapt a form of Jedi meditation to mitigate your Force-related migraines. You have never had time or patience or temperament for meditation before, and you never do again, but while you are pregnant, it gives you relief from the nausea and pain and visual disturbance resulting from Force feedback from the fabric of the universe itself. At its worst, you feel the Force in every single living office plant, Denebian cockroach, and sentient being within two rooms of you. 

Fortunately, it comes and it goes. Otherwise, it would be unbearable; your job as a politician would be untenable. Nevertheless, you realize, to your irritation, that your connection to the Force is never so strong, so direct, so present, so inconvenient as when you are running late to a meeting out of your office and trying to hold down pregnancy-related heartburn and cursing with pregnancy-short breath about how your pregnancy-swollen feet no longer fit into any of your shoes.

What if your child had not been born Force-sensitive? 

What if --

…

One night, you are working late. Han is away, and you are irritated at the new budget figures in the memorandum before you. Your righteous indignation grows, and at the height of it, when you are ready to throw the mug in your hand against the wall, you feel something within you. He does not speak and will not have words for another two years. You will not even feel him kick or use his hands for another month. He, at this point, is a spark, less complex and less aware than the Alsakan splice spaniel that one of the delegates you met that afternoon had been carrying in the crook of his elbow: certainly less complex than some of the organisms that had formed the traditional local food served at the luncheon that preceded the meeting. 

In some ways, in fact, using _he_ is answering a question that has not yet been asked. Chromosomes might have been sorted and reproduced, set at the moment of conception absent intervening events, but what does a fetus, less than two inches along, whose eyelids are still translucent, whose ears are located in the position shared by all mammalian creatures in this stage of development, from the rats in space cargo holds to the winged, echo-locating air creatures of Sarkan IV -- what does that fetus know about human notions of gender, which differ from planet to planet and civilization to civilization and from time to time? 

But there. 

A point. There is something alive inside you.

In the due fullness of time, it becomes clear that your child inherited your temper. It becomes clear your child identifies as _he_. It becomes clear that _he_ carries, to the full measure, your family’s gift in the Force.

…

For forty-one weeks and three days, you carry that point within you You feel it grow and change and expand and become more and more complex. It becomes your child and Han’s child, lying a hand’s breadth below your heart. 

Before his birth, you touch his awareness with yours, and because he is strong in the Force, you feel him reach towards you in the same breath, in the same moment that is one beat of your heart and two beats of his. You do not feel him at the moment of conception, but after that night when you were ready to throw the mug against the wall, you begin to. You follow him from a cluster of synapses and organs and midichlorians to a fetus that can hear loud noises through your skin, who turns away from lights that shine too brightly, who puts his thumb in his mouth for comfort. He shares your oxygen; his bones are made from yours. After he is born, he takes food and drink from your body for a year, and his first word is a baby’s pronuniciation of the word _general_ while reaching tiny hands towards you, overwhelmed with joy to see you again.

When his father takes him out for his first flight, his words on coming through the door are to ask, on sturdy toddler legs, in great excitement, when he might take you flying. When his uncle teaches him, for the first time, to reach out and use the Force interact with an object -- his first thought is to come and show you and insist, with simultaneous charm and shamelessness that you can only assume comes from his father, that you tell him that you are proud of him.

The first time he cries tears of real grief -- not childish discomfort, not hunger, not unreasoning fear -- is when you reprimand him, at six, for using the Force in a moment of a violent anger against another child.

He broke Poe Dameron’s arm for suggesting that mothers could die. 

…

One day, when he is barely out of his teenage years, your son turns to the Dark Side and kills a half-dozen children, all younger than him, some by more than a decade, some who have never even held a lightsaber in their hands. They are only the beginning, though. He goes on to kill – how many others? Millions? Billions? Tens of billions is more likely an accurate number, given the destruction of the Republic worlds in order to deprive the Resistance of its support and his role in supporting and enabling the machinery that brought it about. 

One day, with his own hands, with his own lightsaber, without his life being under threat, he kills his father.

Will you ever stop carrying Ben underneath your heart? 

Could you?

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of Ben/Kylo Ren having Leia's temper is from [babel](http://babeltwo.tumblr.com/), and the idea of Poe and Ben having known each other as kidlings is from the joint collective of [Gabby Silang](http://gabbysilang.tumblr.com/) and [Destronomics](http://destronomics.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Previously posted to [tumblr](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/136135303896/forty-one-three).


End file.
